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face-aching cold
Saturday, February 7 2026
If I am going to use my new I2C firmware-flashing, it's going to have to be reliable; I don't want to attempt to flash a slave and have it fail and then not be able to control things at the cabin until the next time I drive there. With that in mind, I did some stress testing this afternoon. I would use the I2C system to write a known version of the firmware and then just see what messages my system reported. It says "Slave firmware updated from version x to y," and if the second number is not 0, -1, or the old version, then the flash worked. I'd then flash it with the old version and see if the message was appropriate. I would do this until there was a glitch. Frequently I'd get a glitch when moving from a newer version back to an older one and the Atmega328 would remain in the bootloader until I hit the reset button. To debug this, I recompiled the bootloader with serial support and looked at the messages. This showed me where in the code it was hanging and told me how to automatically get out of it. But when I had serial support on, the bootloader became extremely unreliable, working only about half the time. I discussed this with ChatGPT and it was pretty sure that having to log data was enough of a distraction to cause bytes to get dropped on their way to flash, resulting in failed reflashing. So once I had the hang-preventing code in place, I recompiled without serial support and went back to testing. This time I was able to reflash the Atmega328p over I2C at least thirty times without a single failure. That is reliable enough for my needs.
Late this afternoon, Charlotte was acting like she really needed a walk, so I took up the Farm Road and back. The weather had taken a turn for the brutally cold, with a measured temperature of 7 degrees Fahreheit combined with brutal winds from the north. As I was walking back homeward (northbound) the wind was making my face hurt so much that I was forced to cover my bare facial skin with my gloved hands. I don't think I'd ever had to do that before.
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